Mondale recalled that President Carter, as his standing in the polls slid, “began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public.” The President, he said, should have “got out front earlier with the bad news and addressed the people more.” He sees a similar problem with Obama: “I think he needs to get rid of those teleprompters, and connect. He’s smart as hell. He can do it. Look right into those cameras and tell people he’s hurting right along with them.” Carter, on the other hand, he said, might not have been able to. “At heart, he was an engineer,” Mondale said. “He wanted to sit down and come up with the right answers, and then explain it. He didn’t like to do a lot of emotional public speaking.”

The Washington Post's Dan Balz frames the issue similarly, suggesting it's some sort of mystery why Obama "has had so much difficulty making a connection with voters on economic issues" in the context of what is arguably the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression:

One of the persistent mysteries about the president is why someone who began his adult life as a community organizer, working with economically displaced workers in Chicago, has had so much difficulty making a connection with voters on economic issues. That was a problem during his presidential campaign. From the questions on Monday, it remains a problem today.

Salon's Steve Kornacki does a fantastic job illustrating why these claims are nonsense in a retrospective on Bill Clinton in 1994 (disclosure: I cross-post on Salon). Just as with Reagan in 1982 (see here and here), an unfavorable political environment overwhelmed Clinton's ability to "connect":

It's tempting -- really, really tempting -- to watch Bill Clinton on television these days and to say, "Gee, the Democrats would be much better off right now if he were in the White House instead of Barack Obama"...

We're hearing a lot of this kind of talk this week, with Clinton back in the news, thanks to his annual global summit in New York...

Clinton, pundits are now telling us, embodies the magic formula that Obama is missing...

This is true, but only to a point. Yes, Clinton was -- and is -- one of the most effective communicators the Democratic Party has ever produced. But his gift for persuasion had sharp and clear limits while he was president, and when he was faced with a political climate like the one Obama now confronts, it was utterly useless.

That was in the 1994 midterm elections, the last time before this year that a Democratic president's party controlled both chambers of Congress. The economy wasn't as feeble, but Clinton had been weakened by a series of public relations blunders and by the success of congressional Republicans in stalling major pieces of his agenda (a stimulus package, healthcare reform, and a crime bill, mainly) and making Clinton seem ineffective. His poll numbers were slightly weaker than Obama's are now and the prospects for his party weren't good.

Nonetheless, Clinton hit the campaign trail with vigor, believing that he could talk and emote his way to a decent November result. And if you look back now and read Clinton's campaign trail words -- or watch him in action -- you'll quickly realize that all of the magical-seeming traits we now celebrate were on full display...

In short, Bill Clinton was Bill Clinton in the 1994 midterms -- and his party still got massacred. The GOP still won 52 House seats and won the chamber for the first time since 1954, and it still won eight Senate seats to control that body for the first time in eight years. And when the dust settled, the political world -- Republicans, Democrats and the media -- was united in one conclusion: Clinton was a goner in 1996. The country had tuned him out. He had lost his ability to "connect."

His experience is well worth keeping in mind now. We like to think that personality, message and campaign tactics are what define elections -- that the good politicians are the ones who put all of this together in a way that trumps structural factors like the economy. But that's just not how it works. Clinton's words -- no matter how masterfully crafted and articulated -- fell on deaf ears in 1994, just as Obama's are mostly falling on deaf ears today. It was only when favorable structural factors were again present that Clinton began "connecting" again. Obama's style may be different than Clinton's, but it already played well with the general public once, and it can again -- if favorable structural factors return.

Comments

Dan Balz writes:One of the persistent mysteries about the president is why someone who began his adult life as a community organizer, working with economically displaced workers in Chicago, has had so much difficulty making a connection with voters on economic issues.

Community organizing is nothing like the kind of overall executive leadership we look for in a President IMHO. A community organizer needs to be skilled at building a sense of grievance, envy and entitlement. That's most easily accomplished by blaming others for the problems in that community.

Mr. Obama has followed the same pattern as President. He demonized big business, oil companies, banks, wall street, high earners, etc. Unfortunately, his anti-business rhetoric has discouraged business expansion and made the recession worse than it needed to be.

While "connecting" can certainly be less important than the structural issues, even you admit it is not neccesarily a "myth" that should be "killed" - your comment that "an unfavorable political environment overwhelmed Clinton's ability to "connect" implies the ability to connect is worth something.

The more I read your posts (and it's been since Spinasity days) the more it appears you take a pretty much black/white view in your opinions, or at least in the way you express them.

Marty, I'm not saying "connecting" is a myth. See the first sentence -- the myth is the claim that "the predictable decline in President Obama's political standing is the result of a failure to 'connect' rather than structural factors" and in general that presidents become unpopular because they are "not connecting."

Brendan, you might be too young to have observed as an adult Reagan's presidency (I don't know).

In my old gut, never have the voting public's trust and confidence in a President collapsed like they have for Obama. There might be some similarity to Clinton's first two years, but the feeling of Clinton's early decline was less severe, and his prospect for reelection at this point in his first term seemed good.

In contrast, many people I know who voted enthusiastically for Obama now admit their disappointment, disillusionment, even shame. They will never vote for him again. Your "structural factors" do not explain this discrepancy (warning: I run a small, heavy manufacturing, mid-American company selling to non-government customers -- mine is a world apart from that of faculty clubs, salons, and press rooms.)

If your analysts tell you that Reagan and Clinton experienced similar "structural factors", "connecting problem" explanatory myths, or losses of trust to those now afflicting Obama, I suspect the analyses are either obsolete, wishful thinking-based, or cooked.

The difference between Obama and Clinton was that the economy was already relatively healthy in 1994, with unemployment falling from 7.2% in early 1993 to 5.6% by October 1994 and continuing in that range right up through 1996.

Now Reagan did have high unemployment(around 10.2% by election day 1992), but economic growth in 1983 and 1984 was an explosive 7.5%, bringing unemployment down to 7.4% by election day 1984.

We would be damn lucky to get economic growth at even half the rate Reagan did in 1983 and 1984, which would still put unemployment at a level of 8.3% by late 2012, which is a tad too high for Obama to be reelected(he needs it to be under 7.5% by October 2012).

Unless Obama can generate 5%+ economic growth in 2011 and 2012, he is going to have a very tough time being reelected.